Hirsch and McConaughey in Killer Joe.

Director William Friedkin has always been attracted to lurid movie material. From the gruesome, overcooked The Exorcist to the vile and unhinged Cruising, he craves plots about deeply conflicted characters who are hopelessly alienated, disconnected from both the society that surrounds them and even their own lives. One craves another well-crafted action nail-biter like his Oscar-winning The French Connection, but at 76, his view of the world just gets darker than ever. Small wonder, then, that he has found his literary soulmate in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, whose twisted, controversial and fascinating work has found its way to the screen through Mr. Friedkin’s jaundiced camera twice—first in the repellant schizophrenic thriller Bug, and now in the toxic trailer-trash thriller Killer Joe. When this sick, ludicrous cocktail of sex, violence and mayhem was first unveiled a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, one wag aptly described it as “the ghost of Tennessee Williams meets the spirit of Quentin Tarantino.” For shock value, cut to Gina Gershon, crawling across a filthy kitchen floor covered in blood to perform fellatio at gunpoint on a Colonel Sanders drumstick, and you have a high-water mark in tastelessness that gives depravity a bad name.

The inbred lowlifes in this B-movie black comedy are members of the Smith family, a clan of troglodytes in a seedy Texas trailer park replete with vicious barking dogs on chains, who swing into ruthless high gear from the very first scene, when penny-ante drug dealer Chris Smith (a game turn by Emile Hirsch, who has grown from the appealing, open-faced kid in The Emperor’s Club into a scabby, hirsute roughneck) arrives in a torrential rainstorm and is greeted at the screen door by his father’s new wife Sharla with a female full-frontal. Following a drug deal that went sour when his own mother stole the cocaine and kicked him out of her house, Chris is broke, desperate and not exactly lit by all four burners on the stove, on the lam from the good ole boys on motorcycles who want money or murder. But Chris has a plan: his mother’s $50,000 life insurance policy. If his mentally challenged, beer-swilling father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), who works as a grease monkey at Bob’s Muffler Shop, and his sluttish stepmom Sharla, a former stripper who works in a pizza parlor, will help, they can knock off Chris’s drunken mom (and Ansel’s ex-wife), pay off the debt, split the profits, and have enough dough left over to improve their lifestyle—maybe get out of the trailer and move up in the world, to a tract house with aluminum siding near a 7-Eleven.

To make sure the job goes off without a hitch, Chris has even hired a contract hitman who never fails—a psychotic cop in a Stetson hat and skin-tight jeans called Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who moonlights as an assassin. The first problem: they can’t pay his $25,000 fee until they collect the life insurance, so Killer Joe agrees to take Chris’s nubile, thumb-sucking, baby doll sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as a retainer for his services. Chris and his dad are reluctant to pimp out their nubile Lolita for a killer’s bounty, but their survival instincts outweigh all feelings of morality and guilt. Besides, her daddy says, “It might just do her some good.” Second problem: What they don’t know is that Dottie’s mom (who is talked about but never seen) has made her the secret recipient of the insurance policy, and Dottie has her own ideas about what to do with the money. Nor does she completely mind the idea of losing her virginity to the swaggering, seductive and studly Joe and keeping the money herself. As the plot turns brutal, the psychopaths turn greedy—especially Ansel’s wife and partner-in-crime, Sharla (Ms. Gershon, shedding more than just her underwear and baring all)—lying, ruthlessly cheating each other and facing the ultimate consequences, in a curdled, rampaging splatterfest finale that sprays blood all over the walls and leaves almost the entire cast on the floor with their guts hanging out. Because the characters are all equally loathsome and stupid, you are never sure if the hilarity is intentional, but I guarantee you the antics of this dysfunctional chicken-fried family will make you gasp and laugh at the same time. Oddly enough, it’s the juxtaposition of comedy and horror that keeps Tracy Letts’ screenplay balanced between entertainment and nausea and highlights the highs and lows of Mr. Friedkin’s fast-paced, pulp fiction, film-noir direction. They can both thank the fearless cast for their passionate willingness to do anything—and everything—for maximum effect. Kicked and beaten by a man’s fists to human hamburger, Ms. Gershon is both amusing and appalling as she pushes the degradation of women beyond the boundaries of political correctness. Even Mr. McConaughey, a terrible actor with no craft or range who whistles through his teeth like a tea kettle until you climb the wall, seems more natural than usual, staggering around in his birthday suit, with his whining Texas accent used to good advantage. He even manages to give Killer Joe a mix of kink and tenderness, finding unexpected down-home joy in something as simple as a home-cooked tuna casserole. Ms. Temple’s thumb-sucking Dottie has erotic moments, but nothing Carroll Baker in a nightie didn’t think of first in Baby Doll. Mr. Friedkin imparts an ugly Texas landscape of convenience stores, pizza joints, auto repair shops and cheap motels to show the downfall of decaying blue-collar America with harrowing effect.

In the final analysis, the atmosphere overwhelms the logic. There is no subtext to the carnage; we hold out no hope that these clueless wretches will learn or grow or stretch beyond the depth of a mug of Lone Star draft. The narrative ideas come from better movies as varied as Double Indemnity, Tobacco Road and Fargo. I confess I found the uncompromising trashiness perversely riveting, until the ending, which pours on the gore like barbecue sauce. It sends you home reeling, but wondering what the point of it was, and why so many worthwhile people bothered to do it in the first place.

rreed@observer.com

KILLER JOES

Running Time 103 minutes

Written by Tracy Letts

Directed by William Friedkin

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch and Juno Temple

2/4

Jude Law headlines the Donmar Warehouse production that played to raves in London this summer, had a quick layover in Elsinore, Denmark—really!—for six performances at Kronberg Castle, and arrived at the Broadhurst last night.

Mr. Law sulks, broods, charms, plots, brays, dances, wrestles, wheedles, fences and, at one point, pelvic-thrusts his way through a brisk three-hour-and-10-minute production. He’s an energetic, kinetic, athletic Hamlet for an energetic, kinetic, amped-up Hamlet. Its energy—and our interest—flag only in its second half, when Hamlet is absent, sent off to England.

Beyond that, though, what is there to say? Hamlet is Hamlet, and either you’re going to see it or you’re not.

It’s a stylish production: Director Michael Grandage, artistic director of the Donmar, sets the action in a relatively simple set of high stone walls with an enormous wooden door, a forbidding Elsinore. It’s dark, shadowy and foggy, with stark white light streaming in from small slits of windows high on those walls.

(The sets and modern-creative-professional costumes of dark jeans, blazers and scarfs in a palette of blacks, browns and dark grays are by Christopher Oram. Neil Austin designed the lights.) This is also a funny production: Mr. Grandage and his cast milk Shakespeare’s humor.

But for all of that, it is not a re-imagined production, a modernized production, an avante-garde production (the last Hamlet I saw was performed by Eastern European marionette puppeteers on an antique carousel in Dumbo), or one of those counterrevolutionary Elizabethan period-piece productions.

It is Hamlet, and Mr. Law is good in it, and that’s that.

WHEN YOU SIT down to watch Carrie Fisher’s staged memoir, called Wishful Drinking, it is not unreasonable to expect that you’ll learn something new about the star’s troubles with drink. But this exercise in self-hagiography, which opened at Studio 54 Sunday night and is as masturbatory as anything to have transpired in a Times Square theater, doesn’t deliver on that implicit promise, or really with anything at all in the way of self-reflection. It is a collection of talk-show anecdotes.

They’re anecdotes ably crafted and by snappy writer—not everyone has Academy Awards patter among their credits—who’s full of charm and charisma and knows how to deliver a one-liner. She’s deadpan, she’s funny and she’s forthright about needing the audience’s affections. But her material consists of mere recollections, not reflections, with no depth, no real structure, and carrying the distinct impression of well-honed bits she’s said plenty of times before.

Tony Taccone, the artistic director of the Berkeley Rep, one of the several theaters at which Wishful Drinking has been developed over the past three years, directs this play in two acts running more than two hours, which is 30 minutes and one intermission too long.

Of course, Ms. Fisher has lots of material. Her parents are Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher; her father left her mother for Elizabeth Taylor, who’d been one of her mother’s closest friends; she’s an alcoholic; she’s a manic-depressive; she’s been married to and divorced from Paul Simon, who wrote songs about her, and the CAA superagent Bryan Lourd, who fathered her daughter, Billie, and then left her for a man; she’s a best-selling author; a gay Republican political operative, Greg Stevens, died in her bed on the night before the 2005 Oscars; and—oh yeah—she was Princess Leia.

Wandering a stylized living room of a set in pajamas and a flowing robe and covered with glitter (the production design and excellent projections are by Alexander V. Nichols), Ms. Fisher seems afraid to leave any part of that history untouched, opting to hit on everything but not engage with anything.

What was it like to be a child of those revolving Hollywood marriages? Ms. Fisher offers no real insight but instead a initially funny but then interminable shtick on “Hollywood Inbreeding 101,” which uses a flow chart and head shots to consider whether Billie and Elizabeth Taylor’s grandson, Rhys, are in fact related. What was it like to discover your husband is gay? “I turn them bald, I make them gay, and my work is done,” she says. Rimshot!

Midway through the first act, Ms. Fisher recalls playing the London Palladium in her mother’s nightclub act when she was a 17. After getting good notices, she reports, she rebuffed a choreographer’s offer to create a solo show for her, because if she’d done so she’d have turned into Liza Minnelli.

So much for that. Thirty-six years later, a devoted audience of largely gay men is watching an addict and noted survivor with a history of health problems and a homosexual ex-husband perform a camped-up greatest-hits montage on a Broadway stage. And just like Liza last year at the Palace—or Dr. Johnson’s bipedal pooch—everyone seems very much impressed, not because it’s done well, but because it is being done at all.

I'VE EATEN GLAZED doughnuts and devil’s-food doughnuts, jelly-filled and Boston crèmes, doughnuts topped with coconut and frosting and sprinkles, both chocolate and rainbow, but I had never—until I visited the Music Box last week—experienced doughnuts topped with rendered chicken fat. Superior Donuts, the new drama that opened there Oct. 1 after a well-reviewed run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater last year, is a rare creation: These Donuts are coated with schmaltz.

That’s a surprise, coming from Tracy Letts, the Chicago playwright who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, among many other accolades, for his previous Broadway effort, August: Osage County, a pitch-black comic portrait of a sprawling, scabrously feuding Oklahoma family, and earlier in his career wrote the lurid and vicious Killer Joe and Bug.

Superior Donuts, instead, is a fairly straightforward heartwarmer—a pleasant, entertaining, funny one—peopled by stock characters. Arthur Przybyszewski is an aging hippy stoner, played with withdrawn resignation by a very appealing Michael McKean, who runs a doughnut shop in the struggling Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. He’s so beaten down by life—expects so little from it—that he can’t even muster much interest when he arrives at work at the play’s beginning to find the shop has been broken into and vandalized. There’s a pair of friendly neighborhood cops who are regulars at the shop—the Irish-Catholic female half is sweet on Arthur, though he’s too downtrodden to notice—and more concerned about the break-in than he is. The Russian immigrant who owns the video store next door is drunken and blustery and filled with “Vaht a country!” entrepreneurial plans (he represents change, of course), and the neighborhood drunk is good-humored and hard of hearing and gives whimsically wise counsel. And then there’s Franco Wicks, the charming, fast-talking young black dreamer Arthur hires to help out at Superior Donuts.

It goes almost without saying that the on-the-make Franco—Jon Michael Hill, a three-year Steppenwolf vet who’s making his Broadway debut, plays the role with infectious enthusiasm and a wide smile, bringing the same jolt of electricity to Superior Donuts he brings to Arthur’s weary life—will bring Arthur out of his shell. It goes equally without saying that Franco will have a secret in his past, and an artistic ambition, and that Arthur will at first resist taking a fatherly role but then embrace it.

These are not faults, necessarily. As directed by Tina Landau, on the carefully realistic set of an weathered corner store (scenic design is by James Schuette), Superior Donuts is sweet, but it’s not mawkish. It’s predictable, but it’s not boring. The only objectionable bits are the periodic moments when a spotlight catches Arthur and he tells the audience his life story of draft evasion, halfhearted marriage and absentee fatherhood—expository soliloquies that feel like theatrical equivalents of lazy movie voice-overs, stopping the story and disrupting the play’s naturalism and momentum.

Oh, and it’s not as funny as August. But, then, little is.

editorial@observer.com

The New York Times reports:

The only good move that would make theater honestly accessible isn’t to lower artistic standards, but rather the ludicrously high ticket prices. Don’t mess with the art. A theater of excellence is one that takes us up along with it; a dumbed-down theater inevitably takes us down. But we don’t call that theater. We call that television.

I mentioned last week that Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention belongs to a familiar genre on Broadway: the TV Movie of the Week onstage. Then again, Mary Poppins, Legally Blonde and Xanadu are among many examples of films live on Broadway, while the American Airlines Theatre forthcoming thriller is billed as “Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.”

It’s all so normal that the question I used to ask about Broadway shows—why not stay home and rent the movie?—has become redundant.

But when a serious play comes along, we’re entitled to raise the stakes: Does it offer us a real alternative to movies or television? Because if it doesn’t, why bother? If it’s “like” seeing a film for 12 bucks, or staying home to watch TV for free, why pay a king’s ransom to go to the theater?

That enduring question was first put to me by Peter Brook 35 years ago. He’d just directed his landmark A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford, and I was meeting him on the eve of his departure for Paris, where he formed his international troupe and abandoned his own successful career in order to search for something completely new. And as we talked, I was struck forcibly by his sense of urgency—as if the answer to the question about theater’s future was literally a matter of life and death.

I came to prefer his theater of imaginative simplicity, where TV reality and the special effects of movies have no place. Call it a theater of magic, an outwardly naïve, artless art that enables us to imagine what—strictly speaking—isn’t there. Shakespeare is Mr. Brook’s model. (“For never anything can be amiss,/ When simpleness and duty tender it.”) So in his epic The Mahabharata, one wheel is a chariot; a silk scarf is a child; a man an entire army; a bare stage earth and sky.

Mr. Brook’s aesthetic isn’t the only one; it’s the one that appeals most to me. Or, as Tony Kushner put it when he described the angel crashing ecstatically through the ceiling in Angels in America: “It’s okay if we see the wires.”

For me, it’s preferable to see the wires. I resist categorizing theater, even so. Chekhov or Brecht? (It brings to mind George Steiner’s essay “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?”) As I see it, there’s room in theater—lots of room!—for Chekhov and Brecht, for the social realism of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s LAByrinth Theater Company, the profound moral conscience of the Epic Theatre Ensemble and the scintillating, imaginative experience of the National Theater of Scotland’s Blackwatch (in my view the finest achievement of the season). There’s a place for every kind of thrilling, uncompromising voice that shouts from the rooftops, “Listen to my story! Look around at the world and hear what I have to say.”

Mr. Brook’s plea for the uniqueness of theater has never seemed more urgent: How can we sustain a theater of consequence whose raison d’être is that it exists in opposition to the pabulum of TV when the difference between the two is becoming more and more dangerously blurred?

I disagree with Charles Isherwood’s exuberant declaration in The New York Times that Tracy Letts’ saga of dysfunctional family life, August: Osage County, is “flat-out, no asterisks and without qualifications, the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years.” Whether or not he’s right about the gifted Mr. Letts’ ambitious new play, look at the references he uses to authenticate its “turbo-charged” three acts and “blissful” three and a half hours:

“The play has the zip and zingy humor of classic television situation comedy and the absorbing narrative propulsion of a juicy soap opera, too. In other words, this isn’t theater that’s good-for-you theater. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, to quote an immortal line from a beloved sitcom.) It’s theater that continually keeps you hooked with shocks, surprises and delights, although it has a moving, heart-sore core. Watching it is like sitting at home on a rainy night, greedily devouring two, three, four episodes of your favorite series in a row on DVR or DVD.”

No higher compliment from The Times, and death to some of us. Mr. Isherwood’s most exciting American play in years must surely be a cut above reruns of Sex and the City or The Sopranos. It’s the favorable association with comforting TV sitcoms and juicy soaps that’s meant to bestow The Times’ seal of approval.

Is it any wonder our theater culture is fucked?

Mr. Letts—whose Off Broadway genre plays Bug and Killer Joe did little to prepare us for the epic scale of his new play—has written a rambling and entertaining black comedy involving those essential props of American family life—child abuse, alcoholism, drug dependency, divorce, incest, pedophilia, nymphomania and suicide.

This is a play, obviously, to identify with.

“My wife takes pills and I drink,” the burned-out father explains matter-of-factly in one of the play’s numerous quotable lines. “That’s the bargain we’ve struck … one of the bargains.”

He’s a sometime poet and professor who’s played by the playwright’s own father, Dennis Letts, in a perfect cameo appearance during the prologue. “Why don’t you go back to bed, sweetheart?” he says sympathetically to his vile wife, Violet, the family ogre, pill addict, emotional blackmailer and hysteric, and unrepentant smoker who’s dying of cancer of the mouth (a big mouth).

“Why don’t you go fuck a fucking sow’s ass?” she tells her husband, as if automatically saying, “Have a nice day.”

“All right,” he replies with a shrug.

Can’t get that on the telly. Well, not every night.

The unhappy father disappears—apparently having killed himself—and the rest of this dysfunctional brood descends on the large, family home outside Pawhuska, Okla., 60 miles northwest of Tulsa, to comfort the ogre-mum who loathes them all anyway. There are three sisters! One has a stoned, nympho 14-year-old daughter and a future ex-husband who’s having an affair with a college student; another a frequently married boyfriend who’s a child molester; and the third an incestuous young lover. There’s also a bullying sister-in-law with A Dark Secret and her obliging, hangdog spouse. It could be a gothic farce. It frequently is.

There’s even a lovelorn local sheriff who long ago tried to take one of the twisted sisters to a school dance, and an American Indian maid (who’s mostly silent and presumably wise). Comparisons with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night must surely be more about the three acts and two intermissions of August: Osage County than its poetry. (It’s also been compared to the white trash plays of early Sam Shepard, and even a rude version of Lillian Hellman.)

Mr. Letts writes well for actresses. And, as we’ve come to expect from Chicago’s renowned Steppenwolf Theatre Company, this is a wonderful ensemble—with Deanna Dunagan’s cruel, mad mother and Amy Morton’s seething Barbara particularly outstanding. The excellent director is Ann D. Shapiro.

August: Osage County is a bold commitment on Broadway. But for all Mr. Letts’s undeniable talent and daring, his play is a melodramatic potboiler. It overreaches for metaphoric significance about the shaky, divided state of America. The circular pop psychology that explains the festering wounds of the Weston family is reductively neat. The many characters hold little or nothing in reserve; they reveal savage emotions, but no mystery.

I did not find it an emotionally “harrowing” play, as more than one reviewer has—Mr. Letts is too fond of loud set pieces and theatrical showdowns. On the contrary, I found a good deal of August: Osage County darkly funny. (“Thank God we can’t tell the future, or we’d never get out of bed.”) Mr. Letts can’t resist thunderous curtain lines (“I’M RUNNING THINGS NOW!”), nor even a “tragic” finale intended to provoke salty, salty tears.

Oh mum, poor mum, she’s freaked out and all alone now. (But she got what she deserved.)

Maybe it’s a juicy soap opera after all.

Mind you, we'll all go in a box one fine day. But not in one with an anteroom for your overcoat. This is the thing, though: The opera begins, and there I sit in my velvet chair thinking this is such a treat . This is the life! And I haven't a clue what's going on.

I sort of know the plot, but I never read the translation flashing by on the supertitles. It's like being plugged into Bloomberg News. It's peculiar of me, perhaps, but I don't want to read when I go to the opera. I want to feel the pure, monumental sound that transmits itself miraculously to thousands of people in the vast, lunatic auditorium. You can't put it into words, exactly.

Which brings me, quite merrily, to the latest revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd at the New York City Opera. I'm sorry to say that not having a box there, I had to sit among the bejeweled riff-raff in the orchestra section during its gala opening. It's not what I'm used to. But, to my surprise, the first thing I noticed was the prominent supertitle screen framing the stage itself. Why would they need a translation when they're performing in English?

Mr. Sondheim's famously creepy Sweeney first opened at the Uris Theater (now the Gershwin) on Broadway in 1979, and it's one of the finest musicals he's created. But, though it won a sackful of Tony Awards, a Broadway musical about cannibalism wasn't for everyone. That's how it became an opera. It became a popular minority art , first produced at City Opera in 1984.

It always had Grand Opera pretensions. The director, Hal Prince, and his designer, Eugene Lee, anxious to fill the Gershwin's cavernous stage on Broadway, transplanted an abandoned Rhode Island iron foundry into the theater as the basis of its industrial set. Sweeney takes place in the shadowy London of the Industrial Age, and Mr. Prince-a self-conscious Brechtian moralist-wanted to create a stage picture of brutal, class-ridden England, not to mention Exploited Soulless Man.

But isn't Sweeney Todd essentially an entertaining penny dreadful about a cannibal whose victims become Mrs. Lovett's tasty meat pies? Brecht would have been pleased with Mr. Sondheim's lyric, "The history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat." But the hybrid of Threepenny Opera and Grand Guignol never struck me as a perfect partnership. Mr. Prince's dominating set and bloated social message appear at odds with Mr. Sondheim's farcical melodrama or gothic romance of the demon barber of Fleet Street.

The composer's score is a clever, loving homage, not to Brecht and Kurt Weill, but to Bernard Herrmann of spooky Alfred Hitchcock fame. Mr. Sondheim has also acknowledged drawing on a wealth of church music for even bigger gothic effect (including the medieval Dies Irae ). Then again, the original inspiration of the show was a Sweeney written by the Liverpudlian playwright, Christopher Bond, for Joan Littlewood's famously renegade little theater in London's East End. Now, if there's one thing the great director Littlewood emphasized, it was theatrical intimacy and fun -the equivalent of a Cockney knees-up in a pub, or a deliciously gory celebration of murderous Sweeney and human meat pies.

Alas, the City Opera production is neither fish nor foul. For one surprising thing, it now looks skimpy on its vast stage. They've re-created only parts of the original set-losing the iron foundry that was intended to fill the big Gershwin stage in the first place. The production is miked, like any Broadway musical. But what happened to the purity of opera's voice?

We've the luxury of the huge chorus and orchestra. Then again, the canyon-sized orchestra pit itself distances us further from the action. Sondheimeans claim that Susan H. Schulman's picture-book production of Sweeney 14 years ago at Circle in the Square, with only a five-member chorus, was a revelation. (It was so pared down, it became known as Teeny Todd .) The sheer size of an opera house makes its own impossible demands. Hence the supertitles at the City Opera's Sweeney , which translated the lyrics from English to … English.

In other Pythonesque words, the cast-stretching the vowels to make the biggest sound-couldn't make themselves clearly understood. In the usual way, that would be fine with me; I don't want to be disconnected even further from the stage by having to glance up at a screen to read the lyrics. But, as Bernard Holland points out in The Times , the supertitle distraction with Mr. Sondheim proves fatal. The lyrics are the stars of his musicals.

It's why Elaine Paige, a star of the British musical, comes off best as a wonderfully funny Mrs. Lovett. Ms. Paige, a Cockney sparrow with a gigantic heart and voice, knows how to deliver a show-stopping song . Arias are different; arias are serious . Still, Mark Delavan, though he's overacting a bit, sings Sweeney creepily well. He's somber and even sweet as the man whose right arm wouldn't be complete without his razor. The promise of death is Sweeney's gleaming calling card. The seductive scene where Judge's throat, innocently offered for a comforting shave from the salivating Sweeney during his lovely ballad, "Pretty Women," is the show's apotheosis.

Mr. Sondheim's second bananas-hopelessly romantic Anthony in his cute little sailor suit, and sweet Joanna with her Rapunzel tresses-don't bring out the best in Mr. Sondheim. ("I feel you, Joanna / I'll steal you, Joanna.") Whatever its faults, Sweeney Todd -one of the weirdest musicals ever created-works best when it doesn't take itself too seriously. As its rousing chorus goes, "Attend the tale of Sweeny Todd!" But when the chorus advances on the footlights at the curtain to point an accusing Brechtian finger at us, they're saying, "Attend to the Sweeny within you." Try telling that to the gala audience at City Opera, just before they go happily on to their opening-night banquet catered by Glorious Food.

Bugs Funny

From cannibalism and obsession to bugs and paranoia: Let me close this week by recommending another macabre tale, Bug , Tracy Letts' acclaimed new play at Barrow Street, Greenwich Village. Set in a trashy motel room on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, it's meant to unsettle and disturb us, and it does.

Its lurid tale-which might seem like a tall tale-is about a paranoid Gulf War veteran who's convinced the government is implanting real live bugs inside our bodies to control us. We're literally being bugged. Mr. Letts (of Killer Joe ) and his director, Dexter Bullard, are so viscerally menacing that the more improbable the story of the bruised outsider-hero, Peter, appears to become, the more we're suckered in. All I can say is that next time you visit the dentist to have a tooth filled, take every care and check what's in the filling.

Bug ultimately works so well because its ensemble of five represents the most authentic actors in town. Michael Shannon's performance as Peter is dangerous and compellingly loopy, but I must single out Shannon Cochran as Agnes, the burnt-out girl who invites a stranger into her motel room out of kindness and need. She can tell us the story of Agnes' life just by sitting there! Silence-or stillness-is one of her strengths; a flickering, utterly natural range of feeling another. Ms. Cochran, the best new actress (new to me, anyway) that I've seen in a long time, brings a world onstage, making the evening extraordinary.